I leave this question open to be answered by anyone who can help me choose the best possible road to take. I am a newbie to the world of linux & have tinkered with fully self-installed Debian & Red hat 8 OS's in the recent past. As we all know the IT field is at it's lowest right now cause of all the downsizing & out sourcing here in america by buisnesses to other countries & competitors. In these slow but exciting times with Linux being adapted more closely into almost all of the major IT solutions like IBM & HP for example; the more knowledge & certs you have, the better off you'll be in the end, thus brings me to the subject at hand that I would like your feedback on. For all the searching i've done looking at cert providers like CompTia & IBM, the only ones i've seen are for Red Hat (RHCT, RHCE) & CompTia's Linux + certification besides the few vendor specific linux/Unix certs that I remember seeing. now in all of your opinions, which Linux cert would be best to obtain? I would love an honest opinion on this because I would like to get the most valuable Linux cert possible so I won't have to backtrack to gain something I should of gotten instead of the one I wasted time studying for. Thanks!

Don't take my opinion on anything, as I am a Linux n00b, but I just read yesterday that the RHCT certifications provide hands-on testing where you actually configure and deploy a server running Red Hat. They claim that this is better than the "cram" method of studying and taking a written exam. Just something to throw up in the air I suppose. Another interesting note was that the certifications can cost in the double digit thousands to obtain.

I'm in a very similar position and therefore am unable to give an educated opinion, however I offer this link as an alterative:
link
http://www.lpi.org/en/home.html

Having got stuck with one OS in the past (You know of the evil I speak), I don't like the idea of Red Hat specific certification.